Daniel Poller – Stone Record

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Daniel Poller Stone Record08.10 – 06.11
Preview 07.10 6pm

Artist in Conversation with Toby Paterson and guests TBC 04.11 6pm

The Pipe Factory is pleased to present Stone Record by Leipzig-based artist Daniel Poller, supported by the Goethe Institut and the Hope Scott Trust. This new body of work examines the protection, reconstruction and adaptive reuse of the built environment. It takes as its starting point the disassembled fragments of a steeple-like bell tower of the Stevenson Institute, a 19th century school building in Largs.

In 2012 Historic Scotland took responsibility for the protection of the bell tower’s masonry, deconstructing the tower piece by piece by hand and conserving it in storage, each block individually numbered in order for its eventual reconstruction. This stone inventory was discovered by Poller whilst researching the process of architectural conversion and façadism during a residency at Cove Park in 2014. Since this time the bell tower has been recommissioned as an ornamental façade in a social housing project 5.2m from its original location.

Travelling around Scotland, Poller documented several examples of adapted historical structures, recording the architectural palimpsest of the contemporary cityscape. Work presented in Stone Record plays with the superimposed layers of history, dissecting and reassembling the images of the buildings to form a visual critique of their cultural heritage.

The Pipe Factory serves as a vital contextual backdrop for the exhibition, itself a repurposed 19th Century grade B listed building, currently being readapted as an arts space. By intervening in the Pipe Factory’s architecture Poller’s installation continues to investigate the processes of erasure, reconstruction and the politics of architectural heritage.

Born in 1984 in the GDR Daniel Poller graduated in 2013 from the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig in Fine Art Photography. His work has been exhibited internationally. He received a scholarship from the Federal State of Saxony in 2016, the Aenne-Biermann-Award for Contemporary German Photography in 2015 and was resident at Cove Park in 2014.